Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday October 28, 2011 @03:50PM
from the alternate-e-history dept.

Glyn Moody writes "In an interview, Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and currently CIO at Mozilla, reveals that Microsoft tried to buy Netscape at the end of 1994. They were turned down because the offer was too low, but imagine if Netscape had accepted: no browser wars, no open Web standards, no Mozilla, no Firefox. How might the Web — and the world — have looked today if that had happened?"

That's a pretty slippery slope. Obviously there probably would have been no Mozilla or Firefox, but who's to say that another browser wouldn't have emerged to start a war, or push open web standards? This is why "what if" scenarios are inherently stupid and pointless: they force you to suppose that nothing else will have changed, but that's not true. Likely another browser would have emerged to fill the void and encourage competition.

Well Microsoft really kicked Netscape butt. But at the time Netscape wasn't about Open Web Standards, It was two sides trying to win their own priority web standards.A new browser would have came up with more force if Microsoft killed the Linux ports of the browsers. Probably Konquer (that both Google Chrome and Apple Safari is based off of) would have became more used then Mozilla and got a big community support to make it on par and better then IE, just because the Linux users needed a web browser.

This is the point so many fans of modern Firefox and other open source browsers forget. Netscape wasn't about open web standards and cross-browser compatibility until relatively recently - probably after the fall of Netscape itself and beginning of Mozilla/Gecko. Way back in the mists of time, Netscape 2.0 was roundly criticized for introducing a bunch of proprietary tags (many of which were later adopted but at the time weren't) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 1.0 was praised for adhering to standards. I can't find it now but recently I stumbled on an ancient page that urged a boycott of Netscape 2.0 and explained in great detail what proprietary tags it had and which were safe to use.

Yeah, I don't have any references either, but I definitely remember a day of protest. The idea was to add some proprietary netscape-only markup to your pages such that netscape users would get a black, content-free page, but users of standards-compliant browsers would see the content as usual. I think that was post 2.0, though, but I could be wrong.

The funny thing is that HTML 3.2's tags came from IE1 in the first place, but excluded those tags not implemented in Netscape 2.0, like &ltFONT FACE=. In fact, the standard itself says it reflected the de facto HTML as of "early 1996".

Emerged? In 1994, there were half a dozen web browsers, and HTML was simple enough that writing one was a relatively easy task. WorldWideWeb itself was about a weekend's worth of work. HTML 2 made it a bit more complex, but a competent coder could have easily written an HTML 2 rendering engine in a couple of weeks. It wasn't until about 1997 that the choice for browsers on Windows was typically reduced to IE or NS (or Opera if you were weird). Mosaic, OmniWeb and a host of others were very common.

Likely another browser would have emerged to fill the void and encourage competition.

Or it could be like chat, where I used to talk on the open IRC protocol 10-15 years ago but now use MSN's proprietary protocol that other clients with varying degrees of success try to emulate because nobody I want to talk to uses IRC anymore (or Jabber for that matter). It's certainly not impossible that Microsoft would be able to make their own MS-HTTP protocol that'd only work on IIS and IE dominant, particularly if they'd rapidly added some of the features that made Flash so successful. Instead of Firef

If they had bought Netscape, then they wouldn't have bought / licensed Mosaic and would have ended up with a different browser war. There were half a dozen browser makers around at the time, Netscape was just the biggest.

IE 2.0 was the first version for Mac and it came out in 1996. I recall the articles at the time rated it a bit higher, as it felt faster due to its ability to load all the text on a page before embedded images were done. Netscape at the time could only do that if the image sizes were provided in the HTML IMG tag. And with so many of us on dialup at the time, being able to read the text while images were still loading was a pretty big deal.

Then there was KHTML and GTKHTML. GTKHTML always kind of sucked, but it did display web pages. And we all know what happened to KHTML. It turned into Webkit, the base code for pretty much every good web browser except IE, Firefox and Opera.

You are missing all of the little Webkit based mobile browsers. The iOS browser is not exactly Safari and the Android browser is not exactly Chrome. I believe the browser that the Nokia N900 runs is a Webkit based not-Chrome, not-Safari browser too.

Valve's Steam client uses Webkit, built right into Steam.

The next big version of the Evolution email client is using Webkit for HTML mail rendering.

Nokia's S60 browser and the Blackberry browser also use WebKit, as do the Android and WebOS browsers. Recent versions of OmniWeb also use it. There are a lot of small browsers for various platforms written using it as well, for example the AROS browser. There used to be quite a few Gecko-based ones, but WebKit is a bit more modular and easier to embed so fewer people are writing new ones and minority browsers have a habit of becoming abandoned after a few years.

How did it work out? Instead of taking Microsoft's lowball offer, Netscape had a $half-billion IPO, the biggest of all time, and the one that still defines "big IPO" a decade and a half (and two or three bubbles) later. Then Netscape was bought by AOL for even more scads of money, which let AOL do to Netscape what Microsoft wanted for less money. So, given the equivalent other results, turning down Microsoft made Netscape's shareholders (including the corporation itself) a lot more money.

But the results were not equivalent. Instead, Netscape forced the Internet to be cross-platform in ways that outlasted even Netscape Inc. According to its own agenda, not Microsoft's (extremely limited and lame one). And Netscape Inc lasted years longer, producing major innovations like Netscape Commerce Server and Netscape Directory Server (among others). Which again set the direction of the entire Internet for at least the next decade and a half (and counting).

In every way you can consider Netscape did the right thing. What could you possibly have been thinking was bad for "Netscape the Company" by turning down Microsoft?

Netscape wasn't the only player in the browser market. In 1994 linux users had to use something, whether konqueror, opera or any other browsers rose, a niche existed to be filled for a better web browser. Microsoft was doing a terrible job, with little competition they had little concern and left themselves wide open to be overtaken. The FOSS community would have backed a different project, and a different browser would have had to have made the same move. Everyone assumes if X company didn't exist no-one e

"In 1994 linux users had to use something, whether konqueror, opera or any other browsers rose, a niche existed to be filled for a better web browser."

In 1994 there was hardly any Linux users. 1.0 was released that year and Slackware was the only player. Also the few Linux users out there did not "have" to have a browser. The web was just not that well established and Gopher was still popular.

In many ways the web was crucial in the history of the FOSS community and there is no guarantee we'd have Konqueror without Netscape. KDE wasn't founded until 1996 and the first release of Konqueror was years later than that.

Netscape had one of the biggest IPOs of all time, and was eventually bought by AOL for a large sum. So, no, it was not erroneously considered to be too low. Unless it was more than three billion dollars (the Netscape market cap at closing on the day of their IPO in 1995 was $2.9bn).

Um, I think you mean "the offers was erroneously considered to be too low." Last time I checked, Netscape did not exist.

Was Microsoft willing pay $75/share? That's what Netscape hit a year later at IPO. The final outcome is most irrelevant. A price is "too low" if it is more profitable to hold on to the shares and sell at a later date.

Why wouldn't having Microsoft be the only browser player in town (allowing them to charge for it!), cause people to basically start the Firefox project? Probably people would have just started with the Mosaic codebase instead and worked from there. Back in 1994 you didn't have to do that much to have a fully featured web browser. Those were the days before Javascript, before frames, before tables, back when inline images were a big deal. That offer would have been around the Netscape 1.0 timeframe, back

Maybe Opera would be a much bigger browser today. Opera got its start in 1994 in an Norwegian telecom company, so it likely would have continued to grow if Mozilla was removed as a competitor. And perhaps would have been far more successful if it didn't have to compete against a free product.

If Netscape was purchased, then the field would have been wide open for another browser to support Java. I recall Sun and MS weren't the best of buds at the time. So if Netscape was taken off the market, my guess Sun would have helped produce a browser written in Java. I wonder if a real browser from Sun that had the backing from the FOSS community would have maybe changed Sun's fate?

Back then Swing didn't exist (well, Java didn't exist, but Swing didn't exist until Java 1.2 in 1998). Java used AWT, which wrapped native controls in Java classes, rather than doing all of the rendering using Java2D (which didn't exist initially either). Java 1.0 did launch with a browser written in Java, although its name escapes me at the moment, but the main focus was on embedding Java in browsers, not browsers in Java.

So if Netscape was taken off the market, my guess Sun would have helped produce a browser written in Java.

Perhaps Java on the desktop would have turned out differently. I still think the outdated and never updated VM in the old Netscape killed Java on the desktop before it even had a chance to take off. Everybody remembers seeing "Starting Java..." on the status bar, followed by the inevitable crash of the browser. Even when it worked, we had to target JDK 1.1 for years even though far better versions had been released.

My first reaction was to think that MSN (as they originally conceived it: a Microsoft-owned alternative to AOL and CompuServ) would have dominated end-users' online experiences in the 90s.

But Netscape was not the only other graphical browser available in those days. There was still NCSA Mosaic, which (despite its family connection to Netscape) would not have fallen into Microsoft hands and would have remained available for users. Even though in the real world Mosaic quickly stagnated, got licensed to MS after all, and died; in this alternate reality it could have become the nexus for development of the web that Netscape was. Or perhaps Opera might have, coming along shortly after.

Microsoft was buying Netscape just to screw it and shut it down. M$ evidently decided it was more profitable overall to just kill Netscape the way it did, with all monopolist crimes M$ was convicted of in 1999 - by which time Netscape was dead, because it worked.

But if M$ had bought Netscape in 1994, by the late 1990s the same people in and around Netscape would have been inspired to start a free, competing project like Mozilla - which would have produced something like Firefox as Mozilla did.

These "single turning points" are no match for the overwhelming flow of the rest of events. Which pressure the global Internet for alternatives to the main choice. That diversity and low barrier to entry are the main advantages to the Internet.

"But if M$ had bought Netscape in 1994, by the late 1990s the same people in and around Netscape would have been inspired to start a free, competing project like Mozilla - which would have produced something like Firefox as Mozilla did."

If MS bought Netscape to shut it down/assimilate it into the Windows empire (actually more likely Office---they'd want to sell it as an app at first) then there would be some crazy dot-com funding in the mide-late 1990's to make a new commercial NuevoNetscape in Silicon Vall

Mostly plausible. But Netscape was primarily a way for Jim Clark of SGI to raise money on Marc Andreesen. That's why "Netscape" turned down the M$ offer as too low - it surely was less than $500M, before the Netscape IPO's aftereffects eventually made $500M look quaint. Without Clark, Andreesen and Netscape disrupting MS, it's not clear how that kind of dotcom money would have played out. Netscape's IPO was the template, and "blind template" was the defining factor in the whole wave.

I still have occasion to use it on an old Solaris box. It is one of the most painful parts of any day.

Disagree. I used Netscape on Solaris starting with the early pre-1.0 releases and thought it was roughly equivalent to the windows releases, sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse. The problem with using one of those old releases is that they are just plain old. Trying to use netscape 3.x on any OS is going to be a sucktacular experience nowadays,

I actually used that as my main browser for part of graduate school (on HP-UX). It was actually better than our version of Netscape. I used Netscape on my computer at home and I think the Windows version was far, far, superior to the Unix version.

1994 had more browsers than 'Netscape' - far more, and the web was completely open at the time. Yes, things would have been very different if MS had bought Netscape then, but the web != Netscape, even back then.

Nonsense, by 1994 it was already a two horse race and with a bunch of wannabes sitting on the sidelines.

Hardly. I worked at Spry in 1995, and our version of Mosaic was better than anything else out there aside from Navigator. The version we had in beta would've totally killed it if CompuServe hadn't bought the company and scuttled the software side of the company. But Dave Pool got his cut of the $50 million (which for the day was considered a ridiculous amount of money for an Internet technology company), and that was that. *sigh* Full SGML browser, from what I was told. Oh well.

To claim there would've been no browser wars is ridiculous. Just because it wouldn't have been Firefox, doesn't mean there wouldn't have been browser wars. Opera? Konquerer? Or hell, at the time Mosaic? Had Netscape gone away, I guarantee Mosaic would've filled the void... and probably better because it had none of the ungodly bloat that they piled into Netscape. Are you forgetting that Webkit (basis of Safari and Chrome) have nothing to do with firefox?

If it was 1996 or 1997, perhaps not too much different. But in 1994, that would change everything. That predates HTML 2, the first attempt at standardizing it. It predates Apache, Javascript and CSS. Late 1994 predates the web presences of Amazon, Craigslist, the New York Times, and Dell.

The only well-visited site I can think of still in existence was the whitehouse.gov, and it was extremely primitive. Here's a mirror:

Basically, if Microsoft was able to redirect web development that early, they'd go for something very similar to what ActiveX was for vendor lockin. HTML would remain primitive, broken, and discarded. To make anything more than what was available, you would basically use Microsoft systems over HTTP.

Instead of HTML, you'd use something like Visual Studio to create forms and graphics via drag-and-drop and upload.rc files with Access/VBScript like background controls. Video would be embedded as Microsoft Media Server (MMS) and would run locally.

Taking that out to 2011, it'd probably be similar but sandboxed, and using a lot more XML. But nevertheless, you'd basically only be able to browse the web from OSS with something like WINE -- basically, a emulator/compatibility layer developed from a lot of reverse engineering that wasn't 100% reliable.

..seeing as most website duhsigners totally ignore the original point of the browser arranging the content to suit the display device, the web would _look_ much the same, it would just be a different form of HTML being tied in knots.

"Netscape...was originally founded under the name, Mosaic Communications Corporation, on April 4, 1994... The company's first product was the web browser, called Mosaic Netscape 0.9, released on October 13, 1994"

"Development of Mosaic began in December 1992... Marc Andreessen, the leader of the team that developed Mosaic, left NCSA and,...started Mosaic Communications Corporation."

"Jon von Tetzchner, the CEO of Opera Software, and Geir Ivarsøy began coding the original desktop Web browser in April 199

No. Netscape (mosiac) was in developed in 93, they started developing opera in 94.

The history of the Opera web browser began in 1994 when it was started as a research project at Telenor,

"Netscape Navigator was based on the Mosaic web browser, which was co-written by Marc Andreessen, a part-time employee of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a student at the University of Illinois. After Andreessen graduated in 1993,"

Where does your timeline come from? AFAICS Netscape was founded on April 4th, 1994 [wikipedia.org] (as Mosaic Communications and just two years and a bit after the first HTML specification [wikipedia.org] came into being) and Opera was founded on Augst 30th, 1995 [wikipedia.org].

"You can't control the market of search providors like you can with Word. MS would have to rewrite w3c and lock html, encrypt it with proprietary protocols not based on HTTP, and do crazy shit to kill all competition. It is not like controlling the.doc formats in Word to force Office. MS excells at this (no pun intended) but the WWW is a different beast. As long as something is somewhat open alternative will pop out and once that happens the monopolists no longer writes the rules and controls the market.

There would be another browser if it were not for Firefox.

In 1994 there were 4 browsers out there. Some were as good as Mosaic too and I used one that I can't remember the name of which was made by a lawyer organization. Anyway, Netscape was the best one and it didn't win until the late 1990s.

What would have happened is another browser would have come by. IE 6 was ok in 2001, but security holes, and terrible development efforts to get anything done in it created the fuel for Mozilla Phoenix (later Firefox). Konqueror was created on Linux that was starting to become popular which is what webkit is based off of (engine of Chrome).

Mac users also would have used a different browser altogether as IE did not exist on the mac until 1998 if I recall. Was there even a MacOS8 or MacOS9 version before MacOSX? I do not recall as I was an NT user then. Someone can correct me if I am wrong as I didn't use macs then but it stands my point. Linux was more popular and so was Unix 10+ years ago in the workstation market and they would have used a different browser or a Gnu based one would come about that would be ported to all operating systems such as Konqueror. Universities were not all NT and Windows based like today and these CS and engineering students were most of the internet users anyway in the mid 1990s. Not the general public.

When MS had 90% of the market in the dark days of 2004 - 2006 demand for a way out corrected it. Many people do not like control by one company. Firefox was born. I just remembered Opera does exist and is popular in Russia and Eastern Europe. Perhaps, that would be the new norm? Demand exists outside of the workplace who do not want one company, one standard, one way of doing things etc.

IE 6 did make much of the web proprietary and started the intranets that can't be upgraded today that we all loathe, but MS attempts at proprietarization failed. Too many people need the net on many devices which means standards and more browsers hence the race for HTML 5.

It's only possible today because of the current state of the Web. A web locked-down by Microsoft from 1994 up to today would have resulted in a locked-down network where only Microsoft products are allowed to access it, ActiveX everywhere, etc.

Heck, don't people remember those IE-only websites? That wasn't even a decade ago!

It's only possible today because of the current state of the Web. A web locked-down by Microsoft from 1994 up to today would have resulted in a locked-down network where only Microsoft products are allowed to access it, ActiveX everywhere, etc.

Heck, don't people remember those IE-only websites? That wasn't even a decade ago!

Just be glad that Netscape didn't sell out.

A decade ago? How about an hour ago while I was in the office..... IE only websites are definitely NOT a thing of the past yet.

Sorry, but that is a remarkably naive statement. If Microsoft had cornered the market on the primary interface used to access "the Internet", it is very possible, likely, even, that "the Internet" would be a very different place. Easily different enough to have had a profound impact on all the technologies that use it, and by extension, on those entities that developed those technologies. To suggest that this or that client application would have evolved unchanged by such a different reality is, well..., na

I use the android browser. Mainly because when I hit sites with firefox I get the full version usually and with the android browser I get the slimmed down "mobile" version. Wish it wasn't the case, though.

Er? Since Safari is an Apple product why would you expect to see it on a tablet that isn't an Apple product? WebKit which is at the core of Safari is used by other tablets like Xoom, PlayBook, and Galaxy Tab.

What would have happened if Microsoft didn't drop support for Mac when the they did? Safari came in to fill a void. The ones people are mentioning are just a few of the many out there. Beyond those, there are little projects people have done to make their own. I'd bet quite a few of us have said "how hard could it possibly be to write a rendering engine?":)

If MSIE and Netscape never existed, would we have something now? Who knows. I can guarantee, if there's a profit t

Many people predict the future, starting from now. What's different about that from predicting it from the past? Well, for one thing, when predicting from the past, we do know how one outcome actually came out, and some of the reasons it may have come out that way. We can compare this to alternate ways the event might have played out.

The problem is that this "what if" is extremely dumb and started from a flawed premise "no browser wars, no open Web standards", At the time this all started up there was a miriad of browsers out there, however between the 2 propriety browsers of Microsoft and Netscape they killed them all off, the truth is we will never know whether the browser wars were beneficial or detrimental to the web eco system, perhaps without that war all the other browsers would have have flourished into a vibrant and stable eco-system bringing about a web nirvana instead of withering and dying, we will never know and don't have enough information to make usefull "what if" statements to learn from the past in this case.

That's a flawed argument. If what you said is true a large portion of the study of military science wouldn't exist. Its entire basis for developing strategies and tactics is to look at previous battles and situations and ask "what if" to figure out what would happen, and be able to apply it for future situations.

Except there isn't anything to learn by doing a "what if here because it wasn't MSFT that killed Netscape it was their own incompetence, just as it wasn't Mozilla that caused the surge of free browsers it was the fact MSFT screwed the pooch by saying "We won!" and then promptly firing all the IE team and letting IE 6 rot.

And lets not forget that BOTH browsers were proprietary as hell back in the day, or has everyone forgotten the innovation that was the blink tag? But then NS blew it with NS 4, that was suc

Nope... as an historian, let me tell you: 'what if' are total bullcrap, ego posturing waste of time. From highschool to uni, any student starting a "what if" ego stroking move is shut down by the teacher. It's not smart, it's just trolling history in a poor way...

Speaking out of my Seldon hat, if MS had bought Netscape, the inevitable dust up with the FTC might have taken place over Apple's corpse instead of Netscape's. With a sufficiently large integral, the actual names of the winners and losers are a footnote to the great becoming.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita [wikipedia.org] is our closest living Seldonite. Some other political scientists say that if you had the quality of input data his model requires, you could work the same conclusions the hard way. M